I recently purchased two remote control cars for my nephews from a dollar store. The cars came with three rechargeable AA batteries and also a cheap AC charger that connects to the car, but unfortunately grew hot when plugged in (a classic wall wart). So I’m giving them the cars with a solar panel and withholding the AC chargers. The best part is how easy it was to make it all work as I piggy-backed on the car’s built-in charging circuit.
6V Solar panel – 1.3 Watt – These panels come to us from Voltaic Systems, makers of fine solar-powered bags and packs. These are waterproof, scratch resistant, and UV resistant. They use a high efficiency monocrystalline cell. They output 6V at 200 mA via 3.5mm x 1.3mm DC jack connector. The substrate is an aluminum / plastic composite, specifically designed to be strong and lightweight. They can easily stand up to typical outdoor use including being dropped and leaned on.
That’s right – we’re finally coming full circle with the Fritzing project and are soon launching the much-wanted fabrication service that turns your Fritzing sketches into professional printed circuit boards! So in order to kick it off, we thought why not celebrate this as a fritzmas present to the community. We will produce 24 of your Arduino Shields (or other) designs you made with Fritzing. You will receive two copies for free, including free shipping. Deadline for receiving your design is December 9th. Head over to the Fritzing fab page to find out how to participate.
A more functional train microcontroller… Power is coming from a 12V wall transformer which powers both the Arduino (at 5V), and the shield(at 12V). The shield provides pulse-width modulated DC to the rails. The microcontroller is programmed to control direction, maximum speed, and rate of change. I am using a momentary toggle switch with center off to increase or decrease speed. The computer is reading the current settings from the controller over a USB connection. Hitting the reset button automatically stops the train.
Holy smokes. That was easy. In one evening I soldered the kit and had my model train doing the “PWM-boogie”. Thanks to Lady Ada for making it possible for wantabe hacks like me to do cool stuff! [and] Added a toggle switch and more code, and now it is a functional train controller. I can set the max speed and max rate of change to simulate a real engine while keeping is easy enough for my 7yo daughter to run. All I need is some positional sensing and I can do some auto reversing, ect. I’m amazed how easy you made this for us! Many thanks Lady Ada!
The FREE IPC-7351B LP Calculator is a fantastic time saver. It is a land pattern calculator based on the IPC-7351B SMT land pattern standard that allows you to define your own CAD land patterns and offers seamless compatibility with the freely-distributed library documentation.
The Institute of Printed Circuits (IPC) has standards for “land patterns” (as they call pad shapes). You can download a free calculator from pcbmatrix.com that lets you generate IPC standard land patterns for any component. It still seems ridiculous, though, that every designer has to reinvent this wheel. There should have been a standard symbol and footprint file format invented a long time ago, with every component manufacturer providing downloadable libraries for their parts. You can download SPICE models from manufacturers, but have to do everything else yourself, or pay big $$$ for quality commercial libraries.
Stefan has started a great chart that compares the features of the various firmware (mods) for the Ice Tube Clock kit! He writes -
As I’m not sure which firmware I want to use or modify I’ve done a comparison between them. I hope I got all features. If not, please give me some input – I’ll put it in asap.
While the normal way of applying solder paste to your boards is with a metal stencil (or perhaps a cheaper plastic stencil for one off prototypes), if your board only has a couple dozen components or you are pressed for time, it may end up being more time consuming than it’s worth to have a real stencil made. Thankfully, solder paste stencils aren’t the only feasible way to accurately apply solder paste to you board. With only a few inexpensive pieces of equipment (and a bit of patience) you can just as easily apply the solder paste by hand
Just completed. Worked first time, no issues, and I’m quite a novice at soldering. Fantastic kit! Everything fit together beautifully, and the instructions were clear. I especially appreciate the mid-build tests.
Double-sided soldering with a SMT oven… in our weekly chats, people asked how the machine does it, kinda like the human, but automated – the glue thing, that is.
It has the latest arduino and Ladyada motorshield. There are three pair of LED – green and two red. Red ones are closer to each other and lower – when you walk close, his eyes follow you. There are two stepper motors supposed to lift his arms, but they do not work very good. The morots are from CD drive, and are not powerful enough (they try hard though), or may be motor shield does not yield enough power? There is vibrating motor from toy frontloader. With 12V it vibrates way to fast – you cannot really see it on a video, you can just hear the noise, but when you come close, and it suddenly start vibrating – that’s spooky The ghost, just like a bat, relies on ultrasonic distance sensor…
The Ice Tube Clock is a vacuum fluorescent display clock kit from Adafruit industries. I recently put one together and have been enjoying its calming blue glow. Unfortunately at night the calm blue glow is a little on the bright side. While there is a menu option to adjust the brightness it would be better if the clock dimmed automatically. Fortunately, the clock came with a few unused pins on the microcontroller and a space on the circuit board to add a sensor.
I added a resistor an a photocell to act as an automatic dimmer. The microcontroller provides power from one of its pins (which is turneed off if the clock is running on battery backup) and senses the voltage across the photoresistor using its analog to digital converter. I added a menu option to turn the dimmer on and off. Its operation is pretty simple. If the room is pretty dark, the display is at minimum brightness. If the room is light, the display is at the brightness set by the user. For extra credit I could add some sort of sensitivity option to the menu but I figured I would start simple and see how well it works. A modified firmware to enable the dimmer control (based off of Adafruit’s Sept 30th firmware) is available there.
Our first open source Homeland Security non-lethal weapon project – The “Do-it-yourself Handheld LED-Based Incapacitator: THE BEDAZZLER”. After attending a conference where the $1million “sea-sick flashlight” (THE DAZZLER) was demoed by Homeland Security, we decided to create an under $250 version and here are the source code, schematics and PCB files! This is not a kit – but it is an Arduino project! – the M4V is here for the podcast folks…
Update: We’ve included a transcript of the video for the hearing impaired and well, we think all videos should have transcripts. For transcripts we used 3Play Media. We uploaded the video, they transcribed it, we paid via paypal, all under a week and under $30 for two videos total.
